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A fired-clay disk from the Second Millenium B.C. may finally have had some of its markings decoded. The mysterious "Phaistos disk," found in 1908 in a palace called Phaistos on the island of Crete, contains symbols on both sides,

A commercial supply ship bound for the International Space Station is ready to launch from the Eastern Shore of Virginia tonight (Oct. 27), and you can watch it live. If you live on the U.S. East Coast, you might even catch a glim

The term nugget doesn't quite do it justice. This thing is more like a whopper. A more than 6-pound chunk of gold sold over the weekend for $400,000, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
An anonymous Bay Area buyer snatch

The state is now at the beginning of the fourth year of one if its worst droughts on record. The drought has been fueled by a spate of disappointing winter rainy seasons that have left meager snowpacks and diminished reservoir lev

Australia said Monday it was hopeful of winning support for its plan to create a vast marine reserve off Antarctica, after revising the proposal to make it smaller.
Australia, France and the European Union first put forward a b

Up, up and away. Way away -- to the moon, in fact. China launched an experimental spacecraft early Friday that is scheduled to orbit the moon before returning to Earth, a first for the country's ambitious space program and conside

Five years ago, if archaeologists digging up pharaonic ruins in Egypt found any human bones, they would usually throw them away. “Most Egyptian archaeological missions looked at human remains as garbage,” said Afaf Wahba, a young

A World War II German U-boat, sunk during the Battle of the Atlantic more than 72 years ago, has been discovered off the coast of North Carolina, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Tuesday.
The Germa

The Navy needed an airport, and by being in the upper left corner of the country, Seattle was a natural place for it. They found a site out of town, and Seattle had one of its first airports. Nope, not Sea-Tac. Not Boeing Field, e

New geochemical tracers can identify any hydraulic fracturing flowback fluids that could have spilled into the environment, according to field tests at a spill site in West Virginia and downstream from an oil and gas brine wastewa

A few days ago, NASA posted startling satellite pictures of the Aral Sea in Central Asia, once the fourth biggest lake on the planet, which over the past 50 years has been virtually drained as a result of an ill-advised Soviet-era

Undulatus asperatus isn’t some obscure anatomical structure next to your peritoneum, nor is it a minor character from the movie "Gladiator."
No, it’s actually a type of cloud formation that weather fanciers have proposed for in

European space officials are eyeing four possible landing sites on Mars for a life-seeking rover set to launch toward the Red Planet in 2018. All of the potential ExoMars rover landing sites are located near the Red Planet's equat

When you think of a place teeming with life forms, you usually think of the Amazon rainforest or some other wilderness. But Manhattan’s Central Park, located in the midst of the nation’s most densely populated city with 27,000 peo

Rising carbon dioxide levels in oceans adversely change the behaviour of fish through generations, raising the possibility that marine species may never fully adapt to their changed environment, research has found.
The study, p

In the azure waters off the rocky coast of Antikythera, a remote island in the Mediterranean with a population of less than 50, lies one of the most mysterious shipwrecks of all time.
In 1900, sponge divers from the Greek isla

The deadly virus responsible for the global HIV/AIDS pandemic emerged around 1920 in the city of Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, according to new research that has relevance to the effort to understa

Archaeologists excavating the large and mysterious mound at the Kasta Hill site at Amphipolis, Greece, have unearthed a broken marble door, Greece’s Culture Ministry announced today.
Made from marble brought from the island of

A spectacular new photo shows a cluster of stars whose brightest objects form a triangle that has been likened to a flock of ducks in flight.
The European Southern Observatory's La Silla Observatory in Chile captured the beauti

Another Arctic milestone was reached this week when a cargo ship fortified against ice completed a solo trip through the hazardous Northwest Passage.
The MV Nunavik, owned by shipping firm Fednav and built in Japan, left Canada

Lighting can strike the ground miles away from the towering thunderstorms that produce it, a phenomenon called a "bolt from the blue."
A high-speed camera run by the University of Florida's Lightning Research Laboratory caught

Since NASA’s Cassini mission discovered the swirling polar vortex in Saturn’s moon Titan’s atmosphere, scientists have been fascinated by this apparently seasonal phenomenon. Now, scientists analyzing Cassini data have found that

A young cancer sufferer from Treharris took part in an inspirational sailing trip with the Ellen MacArthur Cancer Trust. Thomas Harman, 11, joined the voyage along with 16 other youngsters between the age of eight of 18 who are in

Octavio Aburto-Oropeza, marine biologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, has always had a dream of catching science up to the speed of communication.
“Nowadays, how fast is communication happening? Inst

The plight of thousands of walruses forced to crowd on to an Alaska beach because of disappearing sea ice has set off an all-out response from the US government to avoid a catastrophic stampede.
The Federal Aviation Authority h

Brain cells that multiply to help birds sing their best during breeding season are known to die back naturally later in the year. For the first time researchers have described the series of events that cues new neuron growth each

Two new studies published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shed light on how Polynesian seafarers colonized the islands of the Pacific Ocean. Lead author Dilys Amanda Johns of the University of Auckland descr

The yellow, torpedo-shaped vehicles glided through the clear Mediterranean water just 10 feet above the 2,000-year-old shipwreck on the bottom. During the weekend of September 20 the autonomous underwater vehicles made 40 long pas

Kilian Jornet and Emelie Forsberg are two of the most talented and passionate mountain runners ever to grace the sport. And now they have turned their hands (and feet) to organising their own event, creating a truly unique event i

Every evening, sunset signals the start of dinner for billions of wiggling sea monkeys living in the ocean. As these sea monkeys — which are not actually monkeys but a type of shrimp — swarm to the surface in one large, culminatin

From the observation tower in the Thar desert and as far as the eye can see, the dark blue arrays of a million solar panels can be seen sitting silently on the red dust. The Charanka solar park in Gujarat is an “ultra-mega” power

Cubesats provide a valuable, low-cost research space platform for institutions, universities, laboratories and space agencies, but could their use create a new hazard for the increasingly crowded orbital environment?
According

Three rock climbers have paid a $4,000 settlement to Capitol Reef National Park in Utah for violating climbing policies in the making of a photograph that appeared in a Patagonia clothing catalog, a park official said Tuesday.

A hundred years ago, when Robert Falcon Scott set out for Antarctica on his Terra Nova expedition, his two primary goals were scientific discovery and reaching the geographic South Pole. Arguably, though, Scott was really chasing

Most atlases don’t bother much with the polar regions. A simple outline of the frozen landmass coloured a nice shade of white usually does the trick.
But the new edition of the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World has decided

Birds didn't evolve in one fell swoop from their dinosaur ancestors, suggests a newly constructed dinosaur family tree showing our feathery friends evolved very gradually, at first.
Ever seen a bird penis? Chances are you haven

Guess what Earth's been hiding from us, way down in its belly? Water! Lots and lots of water. So concludes a team of scientists who ran computer models comparing the ratios of hydrogen isotopes over time. Taking into account new i

Advances by Islamic State (IS) forces have threatened one of the last safe regions of Mesopotamia still open to archaeologists by driving up the risks of working in Iraqi Kurdistan, it is feared. This month, a team of Italian arch

Barack Obama will use his presidential powers on Thursday to create the world’s largest marine reserve in the Pacific, banning fishing and other commercial activities across vast swaths of pristine sea populated by whales, dolphin

An earthquake registering a preliminary 6.2 magnitude was centered 81 miles northwest of Anchorage, Alaska, Thursday morning, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
"It was kind of a long one," Anchorage Police spokeswoman J

Is fracking greener than solar power and wind turbines? An easy one today... I don’t know. From this study it would be improper to draw a conclusion about which energy source causes less environmental damage.
In the end, it’s a

India has joined the Mars club. Could small amounts of liquid water exist on the surface of Mars? Salt may be a key to answering that question.
India's Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) probe was captured by the Red Planet's gravity

A new dinosaur with a huge nose has been unearthed in Utah and now the question is: what did it do with its enormous shnoz?
The dinosaur, Rhinorex condrupus aka “King Nose,” could have used its namesake body part for a variety

Bart’s Bash, the global sailing race organized by the Andrew Simpson Sailing Foundation which took place on 21st September, has set the new Guinness World Record for the Largest Sailing Race (24 hours).
While the Bart’s Bash t

From where I’m hanging, on a sheer cliff face some 700 metres above the town of Banff, Alta., it’s clear that my scaling skills are about to be tested like never before.
Conquering Mount Norquay’s new via ferrata “is like clim

The widow of Nelson Mandela punctured the self-congratulatory mood of the UN summit on Tuesday, saying world leaders had failed to rise to the challenge of climate change.
“There is a huge mismatch between the magnitude of the

Australian beachgoers got a surprise this week when strange balls of living green algae started washing up on Dee Why beach in Sydney. “I did poke it with my toes and it’s squishy, like a sponge,” Surf Life Saving Club patrol memb

More than 50 geoglyphs with various shapes and sizes, including a massive swastika, have been discovered across northern Kazakhstan in Central Asia, say archaeologists.
Powerful things can often derive from simple principles,

There’s no denying it, Saturn has an astonishing array of moons of different shapes, sizes and compositions. In this newly-released observation from the 10 year-old NASA Cassini mission, the orbiter managed to capture three of the